ON A MISSION

For some years now, cartoonist/columnist/gadfly Ted Rall has
been on a mission. The mission is not so much to displace the traditional
editorial cartoon with the more unconventional (not to say off the wall) work
of cartoonists who mostly supply alternative weekly newspapers as it is to
raise the visibility of the latter group, all, in Rall’s view, worthy of
greater circulation than they presently enjoy. To this end, Rall has conspired
with NBM Publishing to produce three books that each sample about twenty
cartoonists we may never have seen before. The first of these tomes, Attitude: The New Subversive Political
Cartoonists, was published in 2002; the second, Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists, two years
later. The third in the series, Attitude
3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists, came out in 2006. Rall also
edited individual volumes on Stephanie
McMilllan, Neil Swaab, and Andy
Singer — all, I think, available at nbmpublishing.com.

Attitude 3 includes the work of several
Web cartoonists who can actually draw — D.C.
Simpson, Brian McFadden, Matt Bors (lately picked up by United Feature, at
Rall’s prompting no doubt), Mark Fiore
(online animation), Mark Poutenis, Ben
Smith, Thomas K. Dye, and Adam Rust;
some who, charitably speaking, don’t draw so much as they diagram — August J. Pollak, Dorothy Gambrell,
Nicholas Gurewitch, Steven L. Cloud, plus Chris Dlugosz and Michael
Zole, who make hemispheres and squares talk; M.e. Cohen, who scrawls; David
Hellman and Eric Millikin, who
smear; and the inevitable clip-art specialists, Robert T. Balder and Ryan
North. Their commentary is pointed and often funny; but too many of this
breed have invaded a visual medium without a noticeable picture-making skill in
evidence.

Rall, a
keen observer of pop and well as political culture, introduces the book by
noting that cartooning positions at daily newspapers are fast disappearing. And
the alternative, the indie weeklies, have reached a saturation point — no more
openings for cartoonists there. That leaves the Web. And that’s where Rall
looks for this volume. “It’s important to remember,” he says, “that although
all of these cartoonists are at least partly defined by their identities as
Internet cartoonists, they’re only working online because online is what there
is at this particular moment in the development of media. They are cartoonists
first, middle, and last,” he finishes, “ — and damned good ones, too.”